This is just a kind reminder of the UbuConLa happening next week (August 14th-16th) in Cartagena Colombia. With only two previous attempts, the UbuConLa is quickly heading to integrate most of the Ubuntu Latinoamerican teams. This year there will be presence from at least the following countries; Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, España, India, Panama and Ecuador, pretty awesome =)!

With so many attendees I’m sure the UbuConLa will not only increase the awareness of Ubuntu and libre software in the region but will be an ideal forum to exchange experience between local teams and its correlation with local governments and other institutions.

Last weekend the Ubuntu-mx team hosted their fourth UGJ in Mexico City!, Isn’t wonderful when you meet mind liked people and everything just flows?, we discussed in detail Free Software, Ubuntu, the Ubuntu MX team and our favorite quesadillas recipies (I love the ones with chorizo and cheese). We took a bunch of photos and video for those who couldn’t attend =(

Anyway, thanks for attending and we’ll see you in the next one! Have fun =D

This is a kindly reminder of the Ubuntu Global Jam, a world wide event intended to collaborate as community around Ubuntu. This year it will be organized from Friday 4th April 2014 to Sunday 6th April 2014 and right now it’s a great time to start defining where yours will be hosted and what activities you’ll do.

In the ubuntu-mx team, ours will be hosted on Saturday 5th April 2014, and we’ve already started pushing publicity through our main media channels, so should you do!

I’m part of a neat couple of launchpadgroups, in the past I’ve seen some contribution maps in open source projects, and I though it would be cool to have some of those for lp groups. What follows is the process for creating static (google) maps for your launchpad group.

Marker

You’ll need a marker (those ubuntu icons in the map), the featured one is in png 24px × 32px format

Map capabilities are possible due to launchpad supporting Time Zone through its API, it’s not quite exact but it’s better that nothing (if you know a better place from grabbing localization data please let me know).

I first grab Time Zones from all current members of an specific lp group, these TZ are sent to a google geocoder (using the great geopy library) and saved in a cvs file. The cvs file can then be uploaded to a Fusion table and requested through javascript (to draw the marks). Hint: I first tried running everything using only javascript but with large groups (>10 members) the process took too much time.

These two steps will create a file called lp-g9n-team.csv containing the name, city, latitude and longitude of all your lp group members. Now it can be uploaded to google, go to docs.google.com and create a new FusionTable:

New Fusion Table

Export csv file

Result

Fusion Tablets can draw by themselves maps using data from a column of your data, however I couldn’t find a method to customize the marker art.

For this to work, your dataset will need to be shared to everyone, by default is private:

Select File->Share

Options in Spanish, select the higher one

You’ll need to grab the unique ID (will be used in the javascript code):

This is plain awesome, however it has the drawback that it requires to read many of these same files at the beginning of your shell session (every time you open a new terminal, gnome-terminal) which may take time (2 seconds on my current machine, core duo, 4gb of ram). A new version of bash-completion has been on the air for some time, the 2.0 version loads a lot faster (3x on my own machine).

On ubuntu bash-completion >= 2.0 is provided in the following releases:

The Ubuntu Global Jam is an incredible opportunity for the Ubuntu community to unite together around a weekend generally one month before the release of Ubuntu. However if you’re not part of any ubuntu LoCo team for any reason (I know there are several of you reading) you won’t be able to organize them.

Personally I think any person being or not part of any LoCo Team should be able to announce where he/she is gonna sit down and hack on ubuntu =), however in the meantime, you can look at the current list and assist to one near from you, or just hangout with your local friends. Ubuntu is a state of mind!